A regular ECG test is an essential diagnostic tool that characterizes the heart's activity at a given point in time. Abnormal heart rhythms and cardiac symptoms may however sporadically appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Consequently, point-in-time ECG tests may miss critical cardiac anomalies, thereby leading to an increased risk of morbidity and mortality.
It is therefore important to monitor ECG continuously in at-risk patients as they go about their normal activities. Quite often, serious heart conditions like atrial fibrillation (AF), cardiomyopathy, and coronary heart disease are diagnosed with continuous ECG monitoring. This allows for timely clinical interventions like medication and cardiac surgery that reduce adverse outcomes like stroke and heart attack, thereby saving lives.
In clinical practice, it is common to undertake continuous ECG monitoring using a Holter system that can generally record 24-48 hours of cardiac data. The Holter is a small wearable biopotential measurement device comprising several ECG leads. These ECG leads are snapped on to sticky gel electrodes that are attached at various locations on the patient's chest. A Holter monitoring system is inconvenient and obtrusive due to the sticky gel chest electrodes that often cause discomfort and the unwieldy leads that hang between the electrodes and the Holter unit.
Recently, Medtronic has developed and marketed a leadless Holter system (SEEQ™) in the form of an adhesive chest strip (˜4.5″ long, ˜2.0″ wide, and ˜0.6″ thick) for continuous ECG monitoring. Though leadless, this monitor is awkward and uncomfortable because it uses sticky chest electrodes and it is too bulky to be attached to the chest.
Various kinds of belts that can be worn around the chest for continuous ECG monitoring are available in the market today. Many of these ECG chest belt systems are leadless and employ dry reusable electrodes. Still, these ECG belts need to be worn under clothing and are often quite tight around the chest, causing difficulty and uneasiness to the wearer.
Currently, continuous ECG monitoring technology comes with a number of problems and encumbrances. These include discomfort, uneasiness, sleep disruptions, difficulty in carrying out day-to-day activities, and inability to undertake long-term monitoring (for example, monitoring for days, months, and years).
With the advent of newer generation wearables like smartwatches, attempts have been made to integrate ECG monitoring into a smartwatch. For example, Apple has provided dry ECG electrodes on the backplate of a smartwatch (left-side electrodes) and a second set of electrodes on the smartwatch rim (right-side electrodes). A user has to wear the smartwatch on one wrist so that the electrodes underneath touch the wrist. Additionally, the user has to touch the second set of electrodes on the smartwatch rim with his/her other hand so that the heart lies in-between the left-side (backplate) and right-side (rim) electrodes that are electrically connected to signal amplification/conditioning circuitry inside the smartwatch. The quality of ECG data acquired in this manner is generally satisfactory. However, the main limitation is that the user has to touch and hold a second set of electrodes on the smartwatch with his/her other hand for monitoring ECG data. As a result, this system only provides an on demand 30 seconds of ECG monitoring, and not continuous and/or long-term ECG monitoring.
To avoid touching a second set of electrodes with the other hand and to accomplish leadless continuous ECG monitoring, attempts have been made to develop wearable single upper limb ECG systems.
Prior art has proposed the use of single arm wearable devices for leadless ECG monitoring. These systems comprise an upper arm band with more than one electrode on the underside that come in contact with the arm when the band is worn. The electrodes are interfaced with an amplification and control unit that may be affixed to the outer surface of the band. Single arm ECG systems have produced mixed results for a diverse population. The ECG signal acquired by these systems is often noisy, unreliable, and unusable, more so for women and older people.
Based on the principles of single arm ECG systems, other prior art has also proposed leadless ECG monitoring employing wearable single wrist systems. The quality and fidelity of data acquired by single wrist ECG systems has not been properly tested and/or verified. Intuitively, a single wrist ECG system will produce noisier and weaker signals as compared to a single arm ECG system. This is because the wrist is physically farther away from the heart as compared to the upper arm, thus resulting in greater impedance to the flow of electrical charge from the heart to the wrist electrodes.